A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

4 DR. PAUL DEUSSEN. 569than any. he had yet seen, and having a power of fascinatioiljneveryet experienced by his young and ardent soui*Naturally, his friends were anxiously loofc?Qg forwardto the ripening of his brilliant parts, and expected thathe would*soon enter a learned profession which mightbring him respect, fame, and, above all, the convenienceaad <4hedecency of a good pay. But then there was thisSanSkrit ! The vast 9 majority of European scholars hadmnot even heard of it then ;as for making it pa/, I havealready^aid that such a thing is impossible even nowYet his desire to learn it was strong. It has unfortunatelybecome hard for us, modern Indians, to understand how itcould be like that ; nevertheless, there are to be metwifti in Benares and Nadya and other places even nowsome old as well as young persons among our Pandits,and mostly among the Sanyasins, who are mad with thiskind of thirst for knowledge for its own sake. Students,not placed in the midst of the luxurious surroundings andmaterials of the modern Europeanised Hindu, and with athousand times less facilities for study ; pouring overmanuscripts in the flickering light of an oil- lamp nightafter night, which alone would have been enough to completely destroy the eyesight of students of any other nation,travelling on foot hundreds of miles, begging their wayallalong, in search of a rare manuscript or a noted teacher;anjl wonderfully concentrating all the energy of their body^and mind upon their one object c;/ study, year in andyear out, till the hair turns grey and the infirmity ^f ageovertakes them ;such students have not, through God s,mercy, as yet disappeared altogether from our country.Whatever 1 India now has as a proud possession has beenundeniably the result of such labour on the t part of herworthy sons in days gone by ;and the truth of this re-